H-infinity control design with feed-forward compensator for hysteresis compensation in piezoelectric actuators

Abstract

Piezoelectric actuators, widely used in different micro/nanopositioning applications, generally exhibit nonlinear hysteresis characteristics. The compensation of hysteretic behavior of piezoelectric actuators is mandatory for precise micro/nanopositioning. In this paper, nonlinear hysteresis effect is first characterized using the Prandtl-Ishlinskii hysteresis model. The inverse of the Prandtl-Ishlinskii hysteresis model is employed as a feed-forward controller to compensate for hysteresis nonlinearities of the piezoelectric actuator. Slight hysteresis nonlinearity is still observed in the experimental results due to small mismatch between the identified hysteresis model and the measured hysteresis loop. To further enhance the performance of the piezoelectric actuator in terms of mitigation of hysteresis nonlinearity and precise reference tracking, advanced robust full-order as well as fixed-order H∞ feedback controllers are designed and applied to this actuator in the presence of feed-forward compensator. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme in achieving the improved tracking performance with peak-to-peak tracking error of less than 1% for the desired displacement of 12 μm with tracking frequency of 10 Hz.